So quiet it was in that high, sun-steeped room,
So warm and still, that sometimes with the
Through the great windows, bright with bottle-panes,
There’d float a chime from clock-jacks out of sight, Clapping iron mallets on green copper gongs.
But only in blown music from the
Quaint horologe could Time intrude . . . you’d
Clocks had been bolted out, the flux of
Defied, and that high chamber sealed away From earthly change by some old alchemist.
And, oh, those thousand towers of
Flowering like leaden trees outside the panes:
Those gabled roofs with smoking cowls, and
Encrusted spires of stone, those golden vanes On shining housetops paved with scarlet tiles!
And all day nine wrought-pewter
Blinked from their spouting faucets, not five
Across the cobbled street, or, peering
The rounds of glass, espied that sun-flushed room With Dürer graving at intaglios.
O happy nine, spouting your dew all
In green-scaled rows of metal, whilst the
Moves peacefully below in quiet joy . . .
O happy gargoyles to be gazing down On Albrecht Dürer and his plates of iron!
